The Inconvenient Truth About Ethanol

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@gagrice said:
CORYDON, Iowa (AP) - The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America's push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.

With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country "stronger, cleaner and more secure."

America’s Biofuel Boondoggle Rife with FraudTo try and artificially grow a domestic biofuels industry, the United States installed the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) in 2007, relying on a system of annually increasing mandates for the quantities of biofuels refiners blend into gasoline. The scheme was created under the Bush administration and dutifully expanded by the Obama administration—and it’s been an unmitigated policy disaster. The RFS has created an arena ripe for hucksters to fraudulently make millions of dollars, and Bloomberg has a long report on some of the most galling examples of these system-cheaters:

The Ducey brothers operated e-Biofuels LLC, from a facility in Middletown, Indiana. As part of the scheme, they sold over 35 million gallons of biodiesel to customers for more than $145 million by falsely claiming that the fuel was eligible for federal renewable energy incentives, when they knew it was not. In addition, Craig Ducey pleaded guilty to a related $58.9 million securities fraud, which victimized over 625 investors and shareholders of Imperial Petroleum